A new book, Keep Britain Tidy: And Other Posters from the Nanny State, provokes nostalgia for a vanished Britain

An evocative collection of public posters from the Forties, Fifities and
Sixties serves as a fond reminder of a time when Nanny knew best

Detail from a nursing recruitment poster by Aubrey Rix (c.1940s), reproduced in Hester Vaizey's new book, Keep Britain TidyPhoto: The National Archives

By Jonathan Glancey

2:01PM GMT 29 Mar 2014

A decent chap – Eton, most probably, followed by Christ Church, the Guards and a spot of action at Monte Cassino – our man from the ministry has made the cardinal mistake of reading a Whitehall document marked “Secret”, while sat in a First Class compartment between two decidedly suspicious figures.

All too perfectly dressed, down to her pearls and gloves, the lady pictured on the left of our Homburg-hatted chump is, in all likelihood, a Russian spy, while the character on the right, louche in sports jacket and slacks, is quite obviously not to be trusted. “Somebody isn’t using his intelligence”, exhorts the caption to this 1965 Central Office of Information poster, “Keep Our Secrets Secret”.

It all seems rather comic today, a wartime-style poster in the spirit of “Careless Talk Costs Lives”, printed the year the Beatles rode the charts with Ticket to Ride, Bob Dylan warbled Like a Rolling Stone and the Rolling Stones belted out (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. And, yet, Cold War spies seemed to be everywhere at the time, and this government poster – part of a campaign following the 1962 Radcliffe Report on Security Procedures in the Public Service – was certainly not meant to be funny.

How easily, though, “Keep Our Secrets Secret” induces nostalgia. Here is the lingering world of wartime Britain, of steam expresses, John Le Mesurier-lookalike men from the ministry, and of The Avengers, too – of dapper John Steed and dazzling Emma Peel coming to the rescue of innocent, if unguarded, senior civil servants charged with top secrets like our man in the government poster.

In a selection of official posters – Keep Britain Tidy: And Other Posters from the Nanny State, drawn from the National Archives by Hester Vaizey and published by Thames & Hudson – the role of such finger-wagging exhortations is happily examined. While the “Nanny State” is a phrase credited to the Tory politician Iain Macleod who used it in an article in the Spectator in 1965, the tradition of Whitehall-knows-best posters nurtured in the Second World War by the Ministry of Information survived into the world of Seventies pop groups (Abba were a British Rail favourite) and top BBC personalities whose names cannot be mentioned today on grounds of public safety.

Related Articles

Two of the posters collected by Hester Vaizey in 'Keep Britain Tidy' (The National Archives)

Posters warning us to keep secrets safe from spies, to exercise regularly, not to cough and sneeze in public, to wash our hands before eating while not dropping litter, blurred gradually into those – brasher, and using film and photography – asking us to “Clunk Click Every Trip”. While there is ever more public information today – relayed over Tannoys in trains and on any number of dreary station platforms – the sense of moral care represented by posters issued by government bodies has long gone. Viewed in hindsight, a part of that care, and charm, lies in the depiction of a Britain that vanished at much the same time as the last steam-hauled train drew out of Paddington behind 7029 “Clun Castle” on June 11 1965.

Until then – or at least as far as official imagery showed it – here was a homogenous world of decent, law-abiding citizens, the sort who had kept calm and carried on as Hitler threw his stuff at them, and who had agreed, with polite dignity, to listen to governments devoted, or so they said, to leading them into the broad, sunlit uplands of the Welfare State once we had biffed the Boche once and for all.

Here was a world – just look at 1945’s “Train to be a Nurse” (left) – when those caring for us would be decent, honourable and as glamorous as any Hollywood star. A world, too, of contented farmers, unspoilt landscapes, nuclear families, parsimonious appetites and holidays at home. The charm lingers into the era of a privatised Britain, while the messages conveyed – “Keep Britain Tidy” – are as relevant today as ever.

It is hard, though, not to look at these posters through the teasing eyes of Boulting brothers’ films, Ronnie Barker, Monty Python and Harry Enfield among so many others. And, yet, who is to say we live in a better Britain now than we did in 1945, or 1965? As for nannies, Hilaire Belloc reminded us before the First World War, and its “Your Country Needs You” posters, to “always keep a-hold of Nurse/For fear of finding something worse”.

To order Keep Britain Tidy and Other Posters from the Nanny State, by Hester Vaizey (Thames and Hudson, RRP £14.95) for £12.95 + £1.35p&p. Call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk